I have always been pretty good when it comes to math and my quant scores on my practice tests were around the mid-40’s. Truth is, my verbal scores were lower and ranged between the mid-30’s to the low 40’s. During the weeks that I studied before taking the test, I begun to have a change in my thought process about my GMAT strategy. I really began to think like a test maker. I began thinking about the GMAT and what does it reward? It is just a test that will get me into graduate business school, not a graduate English Literature or math program. The GMAT isn’t looking for grammar Nazis or number crunchers, but for people who will be great in the business program. It is those types of people who can distill, manage, interpret and then simplify any loose, complex data and then turn it into useable data to make choices and solve business issues. Let’s be honest, for the GMAT to be useful for admission officers, it has to be a test that is relevant for the skills that are needed to obtain an MBA. In order for it to be relevant, it has to reward certain types of thinking that is very consistent with what an admission officer at MBA programs are actually looking for. This isn’t a test about what you know, it is a test about how well you think. So, it makes sense that GMAT wouldn’t be that great of a test, if you were able to simply memorize a bunch of stuff to do well.

Most of the strategies that are listed here, have some sort of relationship to how the test rewards various types of thinking that could make you an effective business person.

Problem Solving

“Always look at the choices for answers before you begin to solve a problem.”

This is useful when it comes to problem solving. Most people will try to read the question, then solve the problem and then look for the answer that matched the solution that they come up with. The truth is, the answer selection can give you clues to what you need to look for when it comes to the solution, as well as finding if there may be a shortcut to save a bit of time.

If the question asks you to multiply a bunch of random scary looking numbers together, the answers are in exponent form, and were all a large amount away, then it was a clue that would allow you to estimate or just get close enough. Say if there is a geometry problem and there are roots for 3 and 2 or n’s in the answers, then I would know right away that I’m dealing with a 30-60-90 isosceles triangle property or some sort of circle property. There are a few questions on the test that I used this strategy to solve. I was able to cut a lot of time down just by estimating, and saving time for the problems that I would need it on.

Good business people will be able to effectively use limited resources in order to solve a problem. Remember, answer choices are resources and they can often point you in the right direction on how you should approach the problem.

 

Data Sufficiency

“Spot the Con”

Data Sufficiency is frustrating enough simply because of the math concepts, the little details consistently fool you. The math isn’t hard, but GMAT will often hide information in the question or individual statements and try to make you trip up. You may have to translate or rearrange the information to make it useful for the problem. There are even times where the test will embed the information in a certain statement, then put it in another statement, making you honestly believe that you need both statements when only one of them is really needed. When studying, I simply followed these types of answer choices:

• D
• A&B
• C
• E

When I believed that I had reached an answer, I would double check myself and look for hidden information or tricks that would get me closer to the right answer. If I believed the answer was A or B, I would see if another statement would work, which made it D. If one statement didn’t work just by itself, and I believe it to be A or B, I would check to see if it was true, then it would make the Answer C. If I believed the answer was E, I would check to see if I would be able to solve the problem with C. If I believed the answer was C, I would double check to see if there wasn’t any embedded information in A or B that would allow me to do it with just one statement. Lastly, if I believed it was C, and I was sure that A and B didn’t work, I would check to see if I assumed what I shouldn’t have, and then make the right answer E.

 

Reading Comprehension

“The Stop Reading Method”

I had a lot of issues in reading comprehension on my practice tests, I would miss 1 or 2 questions per passage, which is way too many to actually do well on the verbal section. I found that my strategy in dealing with RC was pretty flawed. I would try to read the question, and then skim through the passage to get the answer. This doesn’t work too well since most of the questions need an understanding of the passage as a whole, not just bits and pieces. This is when I began active reading using the Veritas Prep STOP method. I changed my whole strategy and then spent more time on the first question, reading the whole passage while looking for STOP elements: Structure, Tone, Organization, and main Point. This gave me an easier understanding of the passage during the first reading, and I would be able to identify things like:

• What the passage is seeking to do?
• How the paragraphs are organized, and what was the point of them?
• Is the author arguing against/for something or were they just presenting information? If they were arguing against/for something what logic or evidence is used to support their position?
• How do the specific pieces or examples of evidence act as counterexamples or support their claim?

Simply by taking more time to read the passage carefully, I was able to find it faster and easier to answer the subsequent questions about the passage. So instead of taking 2 minutes on each of the 4 reading comprehension passages equaling 8 minutes per passage, I spent 4 minutes reading the passage carefully, looking for any STOP elements and then about 1 minute on each question.

After doing this, I was able to go from 1 to 2 errors per passage to 1 or 2 errors in the whole verbal section.

 

Critical Reasoning

“Focus on the Specifics of the argument and ignore the choices that don’t directly address the linear logic of the argument.”

I have found that most of the wrong answers that I was picking on the CR section were choices that were true, but didn’t actually address the path of logic that the argument was using. Often, the answer that was more appropriate to fit the reasoning, was the correct one.

Take for example: Since the CEO of the company implemented a health care program, the employee productivity has went up by 15% over the last year. There were no other incentive programs that were created, the rise in the productivity, must be due to the happiness with the CEO’s program.

When asked what answer would WEAKEN the conclusion of the argument, the popular wrong answer, and the one I would have selected is:

Incentive programs are normally ineffective at growing the employee productivity as shown by business studies.

The correct answer was:

Over the last year, 22% of the staff has been laid off, while company has shown the same level of business activity.

You can tell from the first answer, it is quite tempting to use as it has employee productivity and incentive program in it. Although, it states it as a general case and not an absolute rule. The second answer, while it may not sound as good, actually addresses the logic of the argument in that the rise in the productivity may have been the result of other employees covering for the workload of the employees that were laid off.

Using this type of strategy, I was able to identify the trap answers more effectively that didn’t related to the logic pattern, which was presented in the argument.

 

Sentence Correction

“Approach the sentence with a goal of creating a logical meaning instead of relying on your ear, or on idioms in order to correct sentences, as well as removing all the junk.”

The truth is, Sentence Correction happens to be the worst subject for the verbal that I had before I began studying. I kept on getting quite a few questions wrong and I wasn’t able to identify any solid rules that I could follow, so I began memorizing some of the particular structures of the sentences on the questions that I kept getting wrong, and saying okay, there is an idiomatic way to write this. This became completely unmanageable, simply because there wasn’t a way that I could hold all of those constructions and idioms in my head to have a decent accuracy level.

Then I began thinking that the GMAT doesn’t reward those who are able to memorize idioms. If that was the case then those who had great memories, but not any reasoning abilities would be able to do good on the test. I then changed my thinking and began to approach SC from a logical point of view. Instead of dealing with idioms, I took a small subset of grammar rules, basically the ones that were in the agreement category like pronoun agreement, subject-verb agreement, verb tense, modifier agreement, and the agreement between equivalent elements. I was able to find that most of the sentence correction questions were able to be solved by applying this small set of rules to them. It was easier to manage, and made a lot more sense:

• When there’s a plural subject, use a plural pronoun for plural subjects, and when there’s a singular subject, ensure that you use a singular pronoun.
• When describing events or things of the past, your verbs should agree when they are describing things of the past.
• Make sure that the comparisons are logical and the elements are equivalent such as actions to actions, nouns to nouns, etc. Example: Like other dog collars, Milo had a plain metal name tag. The dog collar and Milo are not equivalent. You would need it to be – like other dog collars, Milo’s had a plain metal name tag.
• Make sure that the sentence is actually modifying the proper subject. Such as: Since he had been well behaved, Marcus rewarded his cat with a treat. So, who was well behaved, the dog or Marcus? I seen this a lot on the test.

When it comes to sentence correction, using this type of framework is so much easier than trying to get the right idiom from your memory bank. There wasn’t any questions on the GMAT that I had actually known the right idiom to use. There were plenty of instances where I saw a few wrong answer choices that contained a nice sounding idiom that ended up being wrong because it didn’t conform to the rules that are above. If I would have kept on using idioms like before, I would have gotten these questions wrong.

Lastly, the hardest part for the challenging sentence correction problems was that more hidden rules were thrown at me. It seemed that the GMAT just placed a bunch of junk around to hide the actual antecedents and subjects. Take for example:

The committee that handles the country’s budget, made up of 6 congressmen and 6 senators from 12 different states, are currently deciding which programs to cut in order to reduce the deficit.

You can see how this would be a trick as the sentence hides the verb from the singular subject committee. When you cut out all the junk, the sentence would be:

The committee, [random junk], are currently deciding [random junk].

It is now easy to see that the committee needs a singular verb of is instead of are. For most of the problems, I became so focused on the critical parts in the sentence that I didn’t even remember what the subject matter was after I answered the question.

There were probably less than 24 grammar rules that you really need to know in order to complete the sentence correction part, which is much easier than memorizing a ton of idioms.

 

Key Points

In conclusion, the same skills that are rewarded on the GMAT are the same ones that are needed to become a successful MBA and effective business person:

• Effective management, transformation and interpretation of information.
• Clear focus on the reasoning or logic path behind a plan of action or proposal.
• Efficient, creative problem solving.
• Ability to extract the vital elements from unknown sources.
• The ability to ignore distracting data that is irrelevant to the task.

When you are studying for your GMAT, remember that GMAT rewards this type of thinking and you will be able to tell what type of strategies are effective, or will not be effective on the GMAT.